Open Education Working Group and Panel at OKCon 2013

Discussions around open education tend to focus primarily on Open Educational Resources (OER) – freely accessible, openly licensed resources that are used for teaching, learning, educational, assessment and research purposes. However open education is a complex beast made up of many aspects, and the important elements of opening up relevant educational data and changing of both institutional and wider culture are often neglected.

The EU-funded LinkedUp Project is set up to specifically focus on increasing the exploitation of open data available on the Web by educational institutions and organizations. In the Veni Competition, part of the running LinkedUp Challenge, we have challenged competitors to create innovative prototypes and demos for tools that analyse and/or integrate linked and open web data for educational purposes.

We are keen to see the discussions around open data in education pulled into the wider debates around open education, and therefore, we are setting up an Open Education Working Group. The group is still at an early stage of development but we’re keen to get the community involved from the start so they can help shape the objectives and initial activities. Sign up to the mailing list and help us begin to think about what this Open Education Working Group needs to do.

Some of the ideas will be explored in more detail in a panel session delivered at OKCon which is sponsored by the LinkedUp project. The panel session is entitled: The facets of open education: resources, data and culture and will take place on Tuesday 17 September, 11:45 – 13:15 @ Room 13, Floor 2. It will consider questions such as What is Open Education? What role can open data play to make education better, more accessible and more open? How can we ensure that open education really widens participation?

The session will be moderated by Doug Belshaw, Badges & Skills Lead, Mozilla Foundation and panelists will include:

The panel session will end with presentations from competitors in the LinkedUp Project Veni Competition. We have challenged competitors to create innovative prototypes and demos for tools that analyse and/or integrate linked and open web data for educational purposes. There have been some great entries and the shortlist has just been announced, so we urge you to come and see the presentations the competitors give!

We will then be announcing the winners of the Veni Competition later in the day on the main stage.

We really hope to see you at OKCon and at the Open Education Panel Session! Register today!

4 thoughts on “Open Education Working Group and Panel at OKCon 2013”

“Open Education is a worldwide phenomenon aiming to impact and improve Education at all levels from grassroots local initiatives to higher national and international policy. It should be no surprise then how difficult it is to understand and keep pace with the challenges, success and failures of Educational initiatives, projects, research, tools and practices. It is therefore even more difficult to try to develop an evidence-base of Open Educational effectiveness, and to identify the gaps in research and practice that still need to be explored to really push Open Education forward and enhance the impact it has on teaching and learning.”
I agree BUT

Open education is a global phenomenon that helps people to get proper education learning by destroying their barriers. The main aim of this process is to open up the doors to education. Its great that a panel has made in order to analyse all open education data.